County spending $530,000 to keep Health Dept. buildings running

The two buildings that house the El Paso County Department of Health and Environment are so debilitated that the county’s going to have to pay more than a half-million dollars to keep them bandaged so they can continue to function.

‘We’re having almost daily breakdowns,” Monnie Gore, deputy county administrator, told county commissioners on Tuesday.

It was Gore’s second briefing to commissioners on the condition of the two buildings at 301 and 305 S. Union Blvd., which were built in the early 1960s. Gore said it would cost about $530,000 to get the chillers, boilers, air-handler units and pumps in working order.

The members of the El Paso County Board of County Commissioners looked grim as Gore delivered the news.

They’ll have to dip into their reserve funds to pay for the repairs and may approve the emergency funding at their Thursday meeting, the last board meeting of the year.

“Would we rather not spend the money? Absolutely. Do we have a choice? No, we don’t,” said commissioner Sallie Clark.

In September, the department lost about $48,000 worth of antibiotics and supplies for HIV testing when temperatures in a room where they were stored soared to 120 degrees, said Kandi Buckland, the department’s executive director.

 “Every day, it’s a new issue,” she said in an interview after one of the meetings. “It’ll be 58 degrees in one part of the building and 80 degrees in another.”

Gore said the two buildings are in such poor condition that one of the county’s three heating, cooling and air-conditioning technicians is spending about 25 hours a week on the decrepit heating, cooling and ventilation systems. He hopes to hire a fourth technician in 2010.

He emphasized that the half-million in repairs would be a temporary fix. “This gives us another year. It’s going to help us a lot. But there are no guarantees.”

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